Piloting Ideas

If you are looking to pilot an idea and want support surveying potential clients/customers, creating the plan to test the effectiveness of your idea, or designing creative ways to collect data so you can learn and iterate, I’d love to support.

When you pilot an idea it is typically to find out…

  • Does this thing work?

  • Do people like it? Will they use it? Will they buy it?

  • How can I make this better?

To answer these questions you need to do research but not the traditional kind because traditional research is often elaborate, expensive, and time-consuming. What you need is right-sized research.

Right-sizing research is about maintaining maximum rigor while being uber practical and responsive to the environment you are in. It’s designed with a smaller budget and sample, and much shorter time-frame. It intends to minimize risk by testing ideas sooner, at a smaller stage, for less money.

It lowers the stakes for entrepreneurs and participants but the pressure is on for research. It’s an interesting challenge — how do you confidently evaluate the effectiveness of an idea when it is only being tested with 5 people for 30 minutes? Or, 3 people over three months. Looking at this from the lens of traditional research, these sample sizes and time horizons are laughable. But, I don’t think that means we say screw it and just go with our gut. It isn’t impossible to measure change at this stage. I refuse to believe that.

I believe in what I like to call the aluminum standard for research: be practical, flexible, and accessible. I don’t think you need lots of money, time, people, or the university stamp of approval to do good research.

I had the great privilege of working with 4.0 and the ideas they fund on testing their ideas. I built out content to teach entrepreneurs about the research process, coached entrepreneurs on measurement and evaluation, created a peer review process to review pilot plants, designed surveys to collect data on demand and community engagement, and even created a collaborative of researchers to advise entrepreneurs on the tools they designed to measure the efficacy of their ideas. You can read more about my work with 4.0 here.